Hard as it may be to believe today, once upon a time you had to take your pictures carefully and develop them with even greater care; a lost memory then was truly lost.
But all that started to change 20 years ago on Friday, when the first version of Photoshop was released, and began to usher in the age of digital photograph editing that we depend on more than ever today. Now we can't just imagine a world without Photoshop, we can't imagine the English language without it. How many software packages become verbs?
The Photoshop story began in 1987, when Thomas Knoll programmed a pixel imaging program he called Display. It didn't do much; primarily, it displayed grayscale images on a black-and-white monitor. But it also provided a creative foundation for what would soon become one of the most important apps in the world. Knoll and his brother, John, built on Display's functionality by giving it processing capabilities. Adobe licensed the software in 1988, renamed it Photoshop, and shipped the first version on February 19, 1990.
Since then, Photoshop has become a phenomenon, its capabilities becoming synonymous with graphic design the world over. Many of the features that even casual users take for granted now weren't in the earliest incarnations: layers, without which any large-scale task would seem impossible today, weren't introduced until version 3.0; the healing brush, which essentially made wrinkles, pimples, and moles a thing of the past, bowed in version 7.0. Adobe estimates that there are more than 10 million users of Photoshop worldwide.
But all that started to change 20 years ago on Friday, when the first version of Photoshop was released, and began to usher in the age of digital photograph editing that we depend on more than ever today. Now we can't just imagine a world without Photoshop, we can't imagine the English language without it. How many software packages become verbs?
The Photoshop story began in 1987, when Thomas Knoll programmed a pixel imaging program he called Display. It didn't do much; primarily, it displayed grayscale images on a black-and-white monitor. But it also provided a creative foundation for what would soon become one of the most important apps in the world. Knoll and his brother, John, built on Display's functionality by giving it processing capabilities. Adobe licensed the software in 1988, renamed it Photoshop, and shipped the first version on February 19, 1990.
Since then, Photoshop has become a phenomenon, its capabilities becoming synonymous with graphic design the world over. Many of the features that even casual users take for granted now weren't in the earliest incarnations: layers, without which any large-scale task would seem impossible today, weren't introduced until version 3.0; the healing brush, which essentially made wrinkles, pimples, and moles a thing of the past, bowed in version 7.0. Adobe estimates that there are more than 10 million users of Photoshop worldwide.
